Lisa Simone

Lisa Simone (born 1962), American singer, is the only child of Nina Simone. After Broadway and a military career, she embraced jazz and soul, carrying in her own way an immense legacy onto the Riviera stages.

Lisa Simone, the voice of a legacy

9 July 2016: at the Auditorium Stravinski

On 9 July 2016, Lisa Simone stepped onto the stage of the Auditorium Stravinski, in the hall where her mother Nina Simone had marked the festival’s history. There she blended her own compositions, carried by the albums “All Is Well” and “My World”, with a few songs from her mother’s repertoire, without ever being confined by them.

Between jazz, soul and gospel, her warm voice converses with an immense memory: to sing in Montreux, for her, is to walk again in Nina’s footsteps while tracing her own.

Broadway, the army, then the stage

Before jazz, Lisa Simone led two other lives: an officer in the US Air Force, then a musical-theatre actress on Broadway, where she held leading roles in “Aida” and “Les Misérables”. Only at the turn of the 2000s did she fully embrace song, first under the name Simone, then under her full name.

She has also been heard at the Cully Jazz Festival, close by: over the years the Riviera and Lavaux became familiar haunts for Nina’s daughter.